While rewarding your team members for high sales or another financial metric are nothing new, have you ever considered rewarding them for providing exemplary customer service?

Rewards for observing good behavior are a fun way to create excitement across your team, as they never know what their good behavior will get them, and when!

Before you begin, it’s important to ask yourself what actions you want to improve through this rewards program. Are you having issues with in-store returns? Or maybe your customers are dissatisfied with your level of service over the phone or your location’s slip-ups with getting an order right. By isolating the behaviors that you want to improve, opportunities for rewarding these behaviors becomes easier to spot.

Next, ask: “What do my employees care about?” In other words, what gifts or rewards would be meaningful to them? The simple way to get the answer is to ask them! Explain that you are starting a reward program for excellent customer service, and need (reasonable) ideas for rewards.

Some thoughts to get you started:

Lunch on the boss

Gift certificate for two movie tickets

Free coffee (at a local shop) for the week

Gift certificate for manicure/pedicure, or trip to the barber shop

While exciting for the entire team, spontaneous reward programs require vigilance on the part of the leadership, as you’ll always have to be looking for behaviors to reinforce. If you “forget” to do it one week, and then a second week, the program doesn’t appear important to you, and soon, it won’t be important to your employees (and neither will improving their customer service skills).

Here are some examples of good behaviors to reward:

Polite, helpful phone conversation with a customer

Resolving a difficult customer situation

Going above and beyond for a customer

What are other situations that warrant a reward? What are some other ways to show your employees you care about them?